I am in Uganda working to help farmers in the rural areas of Uganda start with fish farming. But not alone! I am here with an amazing local Ugandan team that are executing the work in the fields.
The work is organized through cooperatives. “Together we are stronger”. Don’t forget(!), the Norwegian genetics breeding programs for salmon was by all means organized as cooperatives in its infancy in the 1970’s and all the way until at around 2010. Both Salmobreed (now Benchmark) and Aquagen jointly owned by a number of salmon farmers. The farmers realized the importance of genetics adopted to intensive production systems just the same way as it had already proven its importance in dairy cows, cattle, swine, and poultry 1. But the individual farmers did not have the expertise, financial resources, or the critical size to go by themselves and therefore joined forces. That is what happens now in Uganda. Farmers are joining cooperatives to access key inputs (feed and seed), purchasing power, training, value addition, distribution and placing power in the market.
Yesterday, I met with the Kidera fish farmers group consisting of 28 members, and members of the Kidera multipurpose cooperative society, with a total of 220 members. ‘Multipurpose’ because members of the cooperatives also do crop husbandry farming e.g. maize.
What did we do in the meeting with the fish farmers’ group? That is for the next letter.
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1) In 1935 Norwegian scientists at the Norwegian University of Agriculture and Life Science (NMBU) started on what became an international success in dairy cattle – the Norwegian Red cow. In the late 1960s, some of the same scientists saw the potential for transferring the principles from livestock breeding to fish farming, especially for Atlantic Salmon, and took the initiative to start the world’s first family-based breeding program for fish.